Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance, and Nomination

Book excerpt: This reading companion and commentary on Lacan Seminar XXIII provides detailed analyses of Lacan's seminar while maintaining an overall continuity and consistency. This book does not purport to provide an exhaustive and systematic line-by-line reading of a very complex and varied seminar. Rather it selects key themes of Lacanian theory that are found present throughout his work. In addition, the book does not try to simplify Lacan's ambiguous style, leaving the text open to different interpretations, while providing theory, commentary, and lines of analysis into some of Lacan's important insights. Finally, this book is not about Joyce the writer, but more about the use that Lacan makes of Joyce. Its purpose is not to apply psychoanalysis to a literary subject, but rather to use the literary text to illustrate and develop psychoanalytic theory, and Lacanian theory in particular. It is an analysis of topology and language, or a linguisterie, as Lacan called it, for clinicians.